Technology Thoughts

"Guys you will never have a chance to build the version 2.0, you have to get it right from the get-go, or keep suffering from your mistakes for the lifetime of the product." - Jiri Karpeta, my boss at LCS International, used to say. It was back in 1995, and while LCS's bread and butter were Helios, an ERP for the SMB segment, we were busy building Noris - the future LCS's flagship ERP for larger enterprises. Of course, given the above philosophy, LCS was quite heavily invested in CASE tools to support our software design efforts. That's where I learned the first time that software modeling matters. But back to the original statement above that you "never get a chance to build the version 2.0" . It may sound too harsh, too fatalistic. Well, you may be right, there are always exceptions to the rule. While I don't have exact statistics at hand, my experience shows that the statement is more often correct than not. I have interviewed hundreds of softw...

The recent boom in big data processing and democratization of the big data space has been enabled by the fact that most of the concepts originated in the research labs of companies such as Google, Amazon, Yahoo and Facebook are now available as open source. Technologies such as Hadoop, Cassandra let businesses around the world to become more data driven and tap into their massive data feeds to mine valuable insights. At the same time, we are still at a certain stage of the maturity curve of these new big data technologies and of the entire big data technology stack. Many of the technologies originated from a particular use case and attempts to apply them in a more generic fashion are hitting the limits of their technological foundations. In some areas, there are several competing technologies for the same set of use cases, which increases risks and costs of big data implementations. We will show how GoodData solves the entire big data pipeline today, starting from raw data feeds al...

Back in 2007 Marc Andreessen , founder of Netscape Communications and an investor in GoodData , wrote his legendary blog post entitled “ The three kinds of platforms you meet on the Internet ”. He defined the following three levels of a platform as follows: Level 1 - “Access API”: “platform’s apps run elsewhere, and call into the platform via a web services API to draw on data and services – this is how Flickr does it.” Level 2 - “Plug-In API”: “platform’s apps run elsewhere, but inject functionality into the platform via a plug-in API – this is how Facebook does it.” Level 3 - “Runtime Environment”: “platform’s apps run inside the platform itself – the platform provides the “runtime environment” within which the app’s code runs.” In the same year, GoodData was founded by serial entrepreneur Roman Stanek to take on the calcified world of Business Intelligence (BI). Unlike other BI vendors, we chose a radically different approach. We did not try to build yet an...

"Our thinking behind the StartupYard partnership was this: if you want to innovate in the BI space, why try to replicate what GoodData has already done in the past six years? Why not focus on your core competency and let GoodData to take care of the rest? Amazon Web Services (AWS) has spurred innovation by lowering the barrier to entry for new software startups as new companies no longer need to buy hardware and run their own datacenter. In a similar fashion, GoodData is changing the domain of BI. If you want to innovate in the Data and Analytics space in 2014, there is no need to start from scratch." - See more at: http://www.gooddata.com/blog/gooddata-platform-turbocharging-european-startups/

Presentation was a part of FIT CVUT / MI-AIT (Případové studie aplikace a řízení IT). We compare the traditional organization model of separate teams for engineering, QA and operations to the DevOps model using autonomous cross-functional teams. The presentation uses GoodData as a case study. GoodData: The DevOps Story @ FIT CVUT October 16 2013 from Jaroslav Gergic

Cloud computing is accelerating the pace of migration from on-premise behind-the-firewall software deployment to Software as a Service (SaaS) subscription based delivery model. While accelerated innovation cycle and reduced time to value enabled by the above paradigm shift are well recognized due to their direct business impact, it is often overlooked how the new delivery model is affecting software engineering itself in terms of tools, processes as well as of its theoretical arsenal needed to develop cloud applications. Updated GoodData platform statistics as of Q2 2013! Software Engineering in the Age of SaaS and Cloud Computing - SERA 2013 - MFF UK - August 2013 from Jaroslav Gergic

Napad roku is a competition for young entrepreneurs in Czech Republic. I was asked to present GoodData as a 15 min case study of a successful global startup with Czech founder and R&D in Czech Republic. GoodData case study at "Nápad roku 2013" - "Jak vybudovat úspěšný globální startup" - May 2 2013 from Jaroslav Gergic

Presentation held as a part of eClub @ Czech Technical University in Prague. eClub CVUT - How to organize work in a small startup? - Prague - April 11 2013 from Jaroslav Gergic

A presentation about what it takes to deliver a SaaS product as opposed to the traditional software engineering. Delivered to the students of computer science at Charles University, Prague on March 6 2013 as part of the Commercial Workshop series. SaaS - Software as a Service - Charles University - Prague - March 2013 from Jaroslav Gergic

On Tuesday April 12, coincidentally on the 50th anniversary of the first human space flight, GoodData have launched Release 50 featuring GoodData Sales Analytics for Salesforce . I took this special opportunity to look back and recap the journey from the " R1 " as we call it internally to the latest " R50 ". Continue reading GoodData turned 50 in just 32 months! on our developer blog .